“I have nature, art and poetry,
And if that is not enough,
What is enough?”
Van Gogh

When landscape painter Marmaduke Matthews first arrived in Toronto from England, Wychwood felt like one of his own paintings.

With rolling ravines cascading from Bathurst to Davenport, the sound of water flowing along Taddle Creek, Marmaduke named it after his home at Wychwood Forest, Oxfordshire, England.

Alan Sullivan was the poet in Wychwood Park. A mining & railway engineering consultant, Alan’s poems and short stories appeared in Harper’s Magazine and Atlantic Monthly.

Designed by architect F. R. Cowen, the Sullivan House is one of the bigger houses in the park. The 3 storey Georgian Revival house features an arched Palladian portico with dentiled cornice and creamed stucco.

Like other houses in the park, Sullivan house’s lot is very deep. The main house is hidden deep in the woods, visible pretty much only during autumn & winter, with its garage extending to Alcina Ave.

“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”
Van Gogh

Sullivan’s poem, “The Kite” (see below), showed his deep appreciation for nature, while drawing contrast to the journey of a human’s life.

91 Wychwood Park, Toronto

The Kite (by Alan Sullivan)

UPON the liquid tide of air
It swayed beside a dappled cloud:
It seemed athwart the sun to fare
Full of strong flight, as though endowed
With vibrant life. Buoyed in the sky
It swam, and hardly might the eye
Traverse the fields of ambient light
To scan its heaven aspiring height.
And, like a spider’s web, there slipped
A pulsing earthward thread, that dipped
In tenuous line, that throbbed and spoke,
Down through the sunlight and the smoke,
Down to a small and blackened brood
Of puny city waifs that stood,
And–lost to hunger, want or time–
Stared, rigid, through the city’s grime
At the far envoy they had given
As hostage to the winds of heaven.

Thus may the Soul to heights elysian
Send argosies of dream and vision:
Send far flung messengers that rise
Strong pinioned, cleaving to the skies,
To float amid the poisèd spheres,
Beyond the tumult of the years,
Till,–down the rare and rainbow line
That earthward trails from fields divine–
Shall pulse the throb of mystic wings,
And faint, sweet, rapturous whisperings
Of incommunicable things.